Ghost stories from Ohio

The Rotting Gift

The summer I turned seven, we moved from one sagging trailer to another just a stone’s throw away. The old one had a mildewed porch and a furnace that groaned...

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The Unlocked Door

On the evening of October 31, 2019, my eight-year-old daughter, Lily, and I had just returned from a neighborhood Halloween party. We lived in a quiet cul-de-sac, and as was...

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The Painted Window

The house on Meridian Lane was never quiet, but the silence that settled over it after my grandfather’s death was the heaviest. I inherited the place, a Victorian with peeling...

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The Saltwater Melody

Lena had been up late scrubbing the grime from the kitchen counter when she noticed the photograph of her late husband, Marcus, propped against the backsplash on the bar. It...

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The Lamp That Wouldn’t Stay Lit

My name is Ellen, and this happened to me about a month ago. My partner, Marcus, and I have been renting a small house on the edge of town for...

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The Gravel in Her Throat

My daughter Mira had always been sensitive to things that others brushed off as noise. At twelve, she carried a battered voice recorder everywhere, claiming she could coax words out...

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The Final Bell

I first heard about Marlene from my wife, who had struck up a friendship with her over a shared love for antique restoration. Marlene had recently purchased the old Meridian...

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The Weight of Unfinished Work

It was the autumn after my grandfather, Harlan, passed. He’d been a carpenter, a man who could mend a clock or a fence post with equal patience. We lived in...

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The Static in the Walls

My name is Lily, and I’m twelve. I know that’s the first thing you noticed, and maybe you’re already thinking, ‘Oh, just a kid with an overactive imagination.’ But I’m...

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The Salt Room

My childhood was split in two: first, the gray concrete of the Edison Courts projects, where the elevators always smelled of piss and the stairwells echoed with arguments that never...

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The Night the Cupboard Sang

I work at Little Sprouts Daycare, tucked in the outskirts of Maplewood, a town so quiet it feels like it’s holding its breath. I’ve been there for three years, and...

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The Sallow Painter

The day we moved into the old farmhouse on Marrow Lane, the sky was the color of a bruise. I was eleven, and my name is Elsie. We’d come from...

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The Clockwork Hum

The old mill had been silent for a decade, its waterwheel choked with weeds and its gears rusted into stillness. I lived across the river in a converted warehouse, my...

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The Persistence of Knocking

I moved into the house at the edge of the salt flats three years ago, drawn by the impossibly low rent and the promise of absolute solitude. The landlord, a...

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The Harvest of Hollow Creek

The first time I noticed it was the summer I turned twelve. My family had just moved to Hollow Creek, a town that seemed to exist in a perpetual state...

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The Cold Red Visitor

I was seven when I traded my bath toys for a shower head, feeling every bit the grown-up with my own bottle of strawberry shampoo. It was late August, and...

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The Cold Drawer

I moved into the old house on Hemlock Lane three weeks ago, after my grandmother passed. The place had been in my family for generations, and my parents thought it...

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The Filet Knife

The Salish Pines Rest Home sat on a bluff overlooking the gray Pacific, its grounds a patchwork of trimmed lawns and windswept cypress. It was not a cemetery, but a...

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The Hollow Hearth

I remember the summer I turned twelve, when the heat made everything feel slow and sticky. My friend Chloe and I were bored of the same old games, so when...

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The Bone Chandelier

In the autumn of 2014, I moved into a Victorian house in the outskirts of a small town called Hollowbrook. The house was a inheritance from an estranged great-aunt, and...

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I’ve always prided myself on being a rational man. Ghosts, spirits, the afterlife—these were concepts for the gullible, the superstitious, the weak-minded. So when my wife’s great-aunt passed and left...

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The Painted Floorboards

The house on Maple Street had a peculiar smell, like old wood and forgotten dust, but my family didn’t mind. We moved into the downstairs flat when I was three,...

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The Painted Laughter

It was a muggy August afternoon when my cousin Julia and I agreed to watch my six-year-old niece, Mia, while my parents attended a late lunch. Their old Victorian house...

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The Left-Hand Caress

The clanking of the furnace was the only sound in the half-finished basement, that and the tinny digital riffs of the game. Our guitars, cheap plastic things, were slung over...

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